"Life is Just Brighter" in a $1.2m Distribution Business

Yeah.

And, and Joseph, what about people at the business at A and A. You. It sounds like you were present enough that they weren't, you know, that you were present enough for that early transition, those early couple of months.

Yeah, I remember in the day one speech, it was really communicated with the seller. You got, you have to sell me, right? You have to put your own trust in me.

And I remember him, you know, saying to everybody that he sold the business. And here's Joseph. He didn't say anything about building me up. So I would say you should definitely communicate with the seller exactly what to say because they're probably gonna get all emotional about leaving the business.

And I could tell he was emotional, which is why he probably didn't even remember to, you know, introduce me and build me up and, you know, demonstrate that trust. But yeah, no, during the first week, you know, I was honest with everybody, was.

I was very transparent, you know, told them what I want to do, but, you know, really just listen to them and built a good enough relationship for everybody to really, you know, be excited about what the, the changes which, you know, most of them Were were happy with it.

Great. Well Joseph, let's now turn to to what you've learned or some of your takeaways lessons stories from this this year of ownership or year and a couple months of ownership as I keep saying. You, you've posted about this on LinkedIn. We'll, we'll, I think you have four articles we'll link to all four of those in the show notes for people who want to read them.

They're great great write ups of of as as you've gone and you know, lessons from the trenches. So I plucked out a few things from those articles that I'd like to just go through with you. The first, you've already touched on losing the GM two weeks before close.

You we've heard about how that ended up in the you structuring an earn out to mitigate that risk. But say other than that the kind of, the mechanics of how you, how you kind of try to mitigate that risk that would, that would still be scary. And how did you approach that and what was the upshot and how it all worked out?

Yeah, no, initially I was scared. I mean I was like I don't know how I'm gonna do this. But you know, after added the, the mechanic of the earn out plus told the seller that he needs to stay on.

I was like, okay, this is enough for, for me to continue. I would say after I left 5th 3rd to work in the business without the GM it really forced me to learn everything about the business in, in three months. And the GM was doing so much where, you know, that was part of the selling point of the owner wasn't doing a lot.